In the security and alarm industry, communications between various and remotely located facilities are of utmost importance. In particular, a premises under surveillance such as a home or commercial building being monitored by a security system, often will need to communicate with a central station monitoring facility. When an alarm condition occurs, such as when the premises is breached or when a fire or smoke condition is detected, then an alarm signal must be transmitted to the central station in a secure, timely, and robust manner. In addition to sending messages out of the security system, it is often desired to be able to send messages into the security system, such as when a central station operator requests status from a particular security system (e.g. to confirm an alarm message). Also, it may be desired to effect control of the security system remotely in addition to obtaining status, such as when the homeowner wishes to operate the security system from a different location such as his office, etc.
In the prior art, communications have been primarily made via the telephone network (POTS—plain old telephone system). The telephone system has been advantageous due to its ubiquity—just about all homes and commercial buildings have telephone network connections in place that are easily adapted for use by the security system to “dial up” the central station. Other means of communications have included radio communications such as the ADEMCO ALARMNET service, which provides a redundant communications path in the event the telephone network fails or is sabotaged. Various technologies have been used for the wireless communications, including cellular technologies.
The Internet is a relatively new communications backbone that provides communications between multiple points using TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol). The Internet Protocol (IP) may be advantageously used to provide each node with an IP address, which is used to establish a communication session. This technology is well known in the art and need not be fully discussed herein.
A relatively recent application of IP and the Internet is instant messaging (IM). IM provides real-time communications between parties (as opposed to the slower means of email) since a session that is established through an IM server allows text to be typed at one IM client and sent immediately for display at the recipient IM client. In addition, files may be transferred and real-time video and/or audio communications may be effected.
The present invention implements the use of instant messaging in new ways in the security field to provide real-time, secure and robust communications between multiple parties as described herein.